Louis Sullivan And The Polemics Of Modern Architecture

By David S. Andrew (university Of Illinois Press, 199 Pages, $19.95)

January 05, 1986|By Paul Gapp.

This book is an academic hatchet job written by an art historian who tries to destroy what he perceives to be various myths about Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.

Andrew picks at the Sullivan-designed Wainright, Carson Pirie Scott and Auditorium buildings the way a small boy might pick at his scabs. He makes statements like this one: ``Quite possibly the effort Sullivan devoted to his career had its source in deflected or sublimated autoerotism.``

The author is calculatedly and pedantically cranky about almost everything Sullivan ever wrote, said or did. Here and there, the patient reader may extract a useful nugget of insight from Andrew`s alternately acerbic and boring meanderings. Mostly, however, the book stands as a demonstration of the lengths to which pedants will go to make architecture incomprehensible.